> Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change.
Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
In the 20th century a lot of cities grew practically 'out of nowhere'. Why has that stopped? That's a great pressure relief valve and gets new buyers/renters out of a vicious feedback loop caused by the tendency of already cash-or-property-rich people to concentrate resources.
"The opportunity/jobs are there" is historically the answer, for millennia of cities. But does it have to be that forever? In the 20th century US, there were a lot of explicit government interventions and such that caused things like the defense industry to sprawl across countless different states and counterbalance it. What would that look like in a post-2020 world?
Cities out of nowhere do exist in function in the USA, there are plenty of cities where people can buy for cheap. New settlements get started due to something unique about the place, be it ports, resources, trade route nexuses, and so on. The USA was a frontier and thus these cities were established. You'll notice in western europe you don't see many new towns either for 100s of years, because it's frontier was settled long time ago.
People want to live in SF because of the effective social networks that develop there and access to it's labor market. Cities are essentially representations of different labor markets, and labor markets in specific places develop because there is something unique about the place, or they seed crystal into a form of 'labor black hole' as a new industry develops.
Sure, but we explicitly tried to counter those forces in the US, including through government policy to build industry in areas where it wasn't before.
Moving the defense industry to be less-concentrated in Los Angeles was deliberate and wasn't moving to "frontier" towns. It was moving to towns that were created for one purpose but had been somewhat "skipped over" after that in favor of the biggest cities.
I think it's probably worth trying to incentivize that more today. It still happens organically some (big companies moving HQs out of expensive areas, for instance), but probably could stand to happen more.
I'm a big fan of the German style of federalization, where federal agencies are spread out around the nation, instead of all being headquartered in one federal capital. The Ministry of Defence is headquartered in Bonn; the BfV in Cologne; the Bundespolizei in Potsdam.
There's no reason why we can't do the same in the US, and have the USDA be headquartered in Kansas City, the Treasury in New York, the DOT in Indiana, and Interior in Colorado. It would be a material step towards "draining the swamp".
Or even more beholden to industry as they live closer to industry than they do to other government agencies, making them even more of a revolving door than they are already. It's tradeoffs all the way down!
> Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
The way this is framed is so insidious. The "change" that "poor established renters" don't want is more expensive housing that they can't afford that will incentivize their current landlords to raise the rent on the properties they have and also change the local businesses to also raise prices.
On one hand you have working class renters that are fighting a literally existential threat to their existence in the city. For many, if they are evicted, without the controlled, affordable rents they will be forced to move into some existence unknown.
On the other hand you have the top 10-5% ultra wealthy that don't want new apartments because they don't want to see poors near them.
Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
In the 20th century a lot of cities grew practically 'out of nowhere'. Why has that stopped? That's a great pressure relief valve and gets new buyers/renters out of a vicious feedback loop caused by the tendency of already cash-or-property-rich people to concentrate resources.
"The opportunity/jobs are there" is historically the answer, for millennia of cities. But does it have to be that forever? In the 20th century US, there were a lot of explicit government interventions and such that caused things like the defense industry to sprawl across countless different states and counterbalance it. What would that look like in a post-2020 world?